Enhancing Distribution System Resiliency through a Novel Transactive Energy Systems Framework

Restoration of end-use loads during bulk transmission system outages is a key challenge for electric utilities. During those outages, utilities often do not have enough resources to fully restore the end-use loads. System reconfiguration can provide access to non-utility assets that can enable restoration; however, not all available switching options are feasible due to voltage and load limits. Engaging non-utility assets for system restoration during system events requires commensurate compensation and incentive calculation. This paper presents a new transactive energy system framework (TESF) to incentivize distributed energy resources (DERs) to provide reactive power for supporting the self-healing functions of distribution management system (DMS). TESF engages non-utility DERs during resiliency events by incentivizing them through transactive signals computed using marginal cost of producing reactive power and marginal benefit of additional switching operations. TESF calculates additional switching options, which DMS then leverages to identify new optimal switching plans to restore additional loads. A test system consisting of multiple IEEE-13 node distribution feeders is used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. For the given system configuration and use-case, TESF results in 24.82% additional load restoration and one additional switching operation.